December 17, 2013

The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 51 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today covering a lot territory including the use of proximity sensors in iDevices to 3D mapping to Apple's "Expose" and beyond. Yet with Apple being involved in so many patent infringement cases with Samsung of late for key features covering the iPhone, it's possible that Apple's latest patent win for resizing objects could come into play in the future and that's why we've highlighted this granted patent today in our report. While the method may seem "obvious" today, it wasn't back in time when iDevices first introduced it. Will it be cause for litigation in the future? Only time will tell.

Apple has been granted a patent today for their invention relating to electronic devices with touch-sensitive surfaces, including but not limited to electronic devices with touch-sensitive surfaces that manipulate the sizes of user interface objects.

Exemplary manipulations include adjusting the size (i.e., resizing) of one or more user interface objects. Exemplary user interface objects include digital images, video, text, icons, and other graphics. A user may need to perform such manipulations on user interface objects in a drawing application, a presentation application (e.g., Keynote), a word processing application (e.g., Pages) or a spreadsheet application (e.g., Numbers).

Apple credits Jay Capela, Charles Migos, William Thimbleby and Christopher Weeldreyer as the inventors of this granted patent which was originally filed in Q2 2010 and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office. To review today's granted patent claims and details, see Apple's patent.

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